A few things disturbed me while reading posts in this thread. If a competition needs to be called out, then it needs to be called out. I don't like this shit about "This isn't POL" when people call out other teams and competitions. If something is shady and sketchy or if a team jacks a routine (aka JATT at Bruin 08) or if a competition committee acts in a contradictory way (aka BOB with SGPD last year), people should know and people should call them out on it so teams/competitions have an incentive NOT to do it again. My interpretation of BTF, is respect of opinions, not the "need to be happy and friendly with everything". My opinion of this site (feel free to disagree) is TO BE REAL without getting into flame wars and starting random rumours without proof.
Okay, Sweet. I got that out of my chest. Let me start out before commenting on the line-up with my bias. I am a member of Truskool Folk, a team that applied but got rejected from BITB. Now, you know there is some bias and rationale behind my arguments. In no way am I saying that the competition sucks or that we deserved to get in, I'm just putting my 2-rupees in as a bhangra affecionado.
The line-up is collegiate. All teams are legitimate. These teams have been established and been around for awhile and been to legit competitions in the past. If we saw, let's say, CMU Chakde in the line-up, I would be puzzled because despite being a promising team, they would stick out in terms of competition experience compared to some of these collegiate powerhouses.
As Hans pointed out, it's very Blowout, but that's also because it seems BITB chose only college teams. It will be a fair competition in the sense that (as dheerja pointed out in another thread), college teams normally start out with similar resources and have the make the best out of their college dancers. Also, these teams are also all co-ed? It's going to be cut-throat and similar sized teams - it's going to be a homologous competition.
One thing that I will state that I disliked is that, according to Vikash, our Truskool Folk director, when Bhangra In the Burgh notified the teams that did not make it, it was very visible on which teams applied and did not make it. The email addresses of the teams applying were placed in the To section and you can easily deduce which teams did not make it. This was unprofessional on BITB's part. I say this because I hope BITB does not do this in the future.
Since that mistake was made, you can figure out what teams did not make the cut. There were some legit teams in the application process and I hope that because they were independent or single-gendered, that did not hurt their application process.
People tend to have the tendency to read one sentence and comment about that or blame my entire rationale of thinking on our team not making into the competition. I'm being logical and fair here. This is my way of commenting on the line-up and I was surprised that certain teams were overlooked for an entire co-ed collegiate line-up. I'm sure there are a lot of factors (bad tryout videos..etc), but like Hans, I see an association, and I feel the need to express it.
BTW, a competition should strive to be the best it can and I know BITB does from the amount of time they spend on BTF and trying to make the registration process fair and all. But, just because they're a second year competition, Jeeti, shouldn't prevent us from calling them out or just "noticing" trends.
Concluding thoughts - Good line-up. Could be better. Why the homo? (-logous lineup)
